A bit dizzy after all those back-flips

Okay, so I know that in my last entry I was talking about using layers of quad-trees to make 3D terrain, but I ended up scrapping that idea and going back to a simple 3D grid. The grid is a bit recursive to save some storage space on completely empty or completely solid areas, but otherwise there isn't anything special about it.

As input into this grid, I'm firing up something I used in a previous (never completed) project: the Diamond-Square algorithm. This will allow me to have fairly detailed-looking terrain without having to spend heaps of time messing with heightmaps or loading large bitmaps from disk. Here's the initial results from shoehorning the algorithm into my project (I apologise for the quality of these images, this will be the last time I use jpeg in my journal, I promise!):

Firstly, a simple test (all series of images are before tesselation, then after)


Here's a random heightfield, tesselated using a standard rough material type:


And lastly, another random heightfield, tesselated using a rough material with the "plateauing" erosion feature turned on:


I'm still tinkering around with these material settings. I'll probably try and explain them a bit better in the updates to come.